The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘No, no, of course not. I went in there in connection with someone we suspected of smuggling raw opium out of Hong Kong. Opium! Those were the days.’

  ‘I remember him. Berryman he was called. Raymond Berryman. He was sent down for a long time. So you went in there in all innocence and there was Targo.’

  ‘That’s right. There he was, sitting at the receipt of custom. No one else there but his dog. Mind you, there wasn’t much room for anyone else. I saw him and it gave me quite a shock so that for a moment I thought I must be seeing things, confusing him with someone else. I’d never associated him with anything but dogs and driving. He seemed delighted to see me. Unnaturally delighted, I mean. That was one of the rare occasions when I saw him smile. He got up and put out his hand but of course I wasn’t going to shake hands with him. The dog was a corgi and there in that tiny place it had its water bowl on the floor and a dish full of some sort of cooked entrails. Targo said, “Meet Princess,” but I ignored this command just as I’d ignored his hand. He didn’t appear offended. I asked him a few questions about our opium-running suspect and he answered them. Truthfully, I’m sure.

  ‘He was looking more prosperous than I’d ever seen him. Very nice suit, expensive shoes I could just see under the desk, an Omega watch. A scarf, of course, but not a woollen one. This was more like a sort of cravat, grey, black and pink silk, not quite adequate to cover the birthmark. He was aware of that and he kept fidgeting with it, pushing the edge of it up to his cheek with his fingers, and each time it slipped down again.

  ‘He hadn’t put on weight, he was the same sturdy muscular type, unchanged except that his hair had receded a bit and there was more grey in it than fair. I was about to leave when he said, out of the blue as it seemed to me, “Funny how these cases fizzle out, isn’t it? One week it’s all over the papers and then when you people can’t find the culprit it disappears and we never hear a word about it again.” He fixed me with his staring eyes in that way he has. “I’m talking about the Billy Kenyon murder, of course.”

  ‘“I can’t discuss that, Mr Targo,” I said, and I thought “culprit” a funny word to use about a killer, too feeble a word. But of course I wasn’t going to leave at that point. My eyes looked into his and he said, “I knew them, you know, that Mrs Kenyon and her fancy man.” Another strange, and in this case old-fashioned, word to use. “No, I didn’t know,” I said. ‘“Oh, yes,” he said. “That dog she’s got, that was one of my puppies. My Dusty’s young’uns. I knew a dog would have a good home with her. Wouldn’t like to say the same of anything human.” And he laughed, Mike, he actually laughed. Laughing was something he did more than smiling. I can’t quite say my blood ran cold because it never does but I had an idea what it would feel like.

  ‘I asked him why he called the dog Princess. “She’s a corgi, isn’t she? They’re royal dogs.” He laughed again and was still laughing when I went, chuckling in an unpleasant way while he stroked the royal dog’s head.’

  ‘But you did nothing,’ said Burden.

  ‘I did what I could. I went back to questioning the staff at the gardens. I managed to get hold of a photograph of Targo, showed it to Glaspell and the rest. None of them remembered seeing him on the relevant day or any other. Once more I had nothing to go on, nothing but a laugh and his saying Eileen Kenyon wouldn’t be fit to have charge of anything human.’

  ‘He had an alibi?’

  ‘I’ve no doubt he would have fixed one up or already had one fixed up if I’d asked him. He’d married again by then, that woman called Adele. It only lasted about six months but she would have alibied him. I gave up, in your useful phrase, because I couldn’t see a motive. What was in it for Targo? Who benefits from Billy’s death? Not Targo. Only Eileen Kenyon. So he did it for Eileen Kenyon’s sake? He hardly knew the woman.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘I’m sure. Come to that, he hardly knew Elsie Carroll. Well, he didn’t know her at all except maybe by sight. I talked to Eileen Kenyon and Bruce Mellor about him. That conversation was the only one I had with them when they were transparently honest, not prevaricating or defensive. Eileen had met Targo three times, the first when she went to the boarding kennels because someone had told her he had puppies he’d give away to a suitable owner. The puppies were too young to leave their mother then but she could choose which one she wanted in advance. Targo had a talk with her about the proper care of a dog and said he’d come and inspect her place after she’d had the puppy two weeks. She came back to fetch the dog when it was eight weeks old and on that occasion he only spoke a few words to her. His wife attended to Eileen, putting the puppy in the dog carrier she’d brought with her and getting the carrier into Mellor’s car.

  ‘Two weeks later he called at the house in Leighton Close, was apparently satisfied with the dog’s condition, its sleeping and feeding arrangements et cetera. He accepted a cup of tea and they chatted for a while, she said. I’d rather not imagine what having a chat with Targo would be like. Billy wasn’t present. She didn’t tell me what they talked about, she said she couldn’t remember, but for Targo to have said she couldn’t be trusted with the care of a human being has to mean that part of their talk was about the hardness of her lot in having a mentally incapacitated son and what a burden he was to her.

  ‘Bruce Mellor never did marry Eileen. They fell out and he was seen no more in Leighton Close. Targo gave up the travel agency and the boarding kennels about a year afterwards and moved away with his menagerie but not with Adele. They’d split up and were divorced after a couple of years. He went back to Birmingham and that woman he’d been with off and on for years, Tracy Whatever-it-was.’

  ‘And now he’s back.’

  ‘And now he’s back. Living in some style. Is he still in the travel agency business? Does he still move around with a private zoo? I think he does. I saw signs of it when I went to Stringfield to have a look at his place. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I haven’t a hope of proving any of this. He’s got older and he may have given up this homicidal spree of his. But I’ve thought like that before. I thought like that when he followed me into that hotel in Coventry and when I imagined I’d seen him in London but I hadn’t. Even if it’s true now and he’s changed, that wouldn’t mean he hadn’t done those things or justice shouldn’t be done.’

  ‘I don’t believe it, you know, Reg. I’m sorry but I don’t.’

  ‘I know,’ said Wexford, ‘and I don’t care. It makes no difference.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was plain that the Rahman family disliked Hannah Goldsmith and she knew it. Not usually a sensitive woman, she did her utmost with Mohammed and Yasmin Rahman, their sons Ahmed and Osman and their daughter Tamima not to appear patronising; the more she tried the worse it got. Hannah’s way of showing immigrants from Asia or the children of immigrants that she and they were all equally free citizens of the United Kingdom was to be excessively polite, flattering and considerate. Of course they saw through this at once, Mohammed with amusement, Yasmin with a kind of indignant suspiciousness and the sons with indifference.

  She began, not for the first time, by telling them what a ‘lovely home’ they had. A pity the house was attached to that eyesore, Webb and Cobb next door. She was a little abashed when Yasmin said the defunct shop and flats above it was their property. But she made things worse by saying that building an extension at the rear, culminating in a conservatory, was such a marvellous improvement she couldn’t understand why their neighbours hadn’t done the same thing.

  Mohammed smiled, said in his pleasant slightly sing-song voice, ‘They are far from well off, Miss Goldsmith. I doubt if they could afford it. We have three incomes coming in here.’

  Hannah had by then made up her mind that both sons probably lived on the benefit. ‘Oh, what do you do then?’ she asked Ahmed.

  ‘Computers,’ he said. ‘I’m an IT consultant. Work from home.’

  She looked enquiringly at his brother. Both were good-looking, d
ark; Ahmed clean-shaven, Osman with a beard like his father. All wore Western dress while Yasmin was in the long black gown of the traditional Muslim woman but hung with valuable-looking, heavy gold jewellery. Osman didn’t answer her unspoken question, so she prompted him.

  ‘I’m a psychiatric nurse at the Princess Diana.’

  Hannah nearly gushed, ‘How splendid!’ but curbed herself just in time and said, ‘Really?’

  In the cold voice which was the only tone Hannah had ever heard from her, Yasmin said, ‘If you wanted to see Tamima, Miss Goldsmith, she’s not here. She’s still at the shop.’

  ‘Oh, do call me Hannah. Yes, I know she is, I’ve been there today. She told me you and she were going home to Pakistan for a holiday.’

  ‘It is no longer home. This is home. But we are going there.’

  Not easily daunted, Hannah was this time temporarily silenced by Yasmin Rahman’s icy, clipped tone. Every word sounded like a snub. With a faint smile, probably intended as a tribute to his mother’s handling of this interfering police officer, Ahmed picked up an armful of folders and other papers and moved to a desk at the far end of the extension. Osman followed him, settling in an armchair with the evening paper. Hannah rallied, asked Mohammed what future was planned for Tamima after her return.

  ‘Perhaps she may go to London for a while to stay with her auntie. My sister, that is. There are girl cousins to go about with and have a good time. Fair enough, don’t you think, when you have worked hard for your exams? Then, she says, she would like a gap year.’

  ‘But people have gap years between school and university,’ said Hannah, recalling her own.

  ‘And why not between school and sixth-form college, then? Sixteen is a difficult age, you know. Teenage is a troubling time and we should all remember that. Oh, yes, she will probably go to sixth-form college. But we don’t know yet for sure. Let her enjoy herself in Islamabad and London first and then we shall see.’ With magnificent aplomb which Hannah was forced to admire, Mohammed said, ‘We mustn’t keep you any longer, Hannah. You are a busy woman.’

  Hannah had hoped to have something significant to tell Wexford. She had nothing, yet she was convinced now, partly by the suave yet resolute behaviour of all the Rahmans, that the purpose of the Pakistan visit was to find a husband for Tamima. That, she thought as she walked along Glebe Lane towards her car, was exactly as such a family would behave if they intended to carry out some ancient traditional rite in defiance of laws they despised. She looked up at the windows of the flats above Webb and Cobb and a woman looked back at her, a white-skinned woman. Hannah wondered how well this woman knew the Rahmans. A future interview with her might yield useful information.

  Street stabbings had until recently been confined to big cities. When the second happened and the victim, Nicky Dusan, died in hospital twelve hours later, Wexford feared a trend had started. People were imitative. They followed a fashion even if that fashion led to terrible consequences. DS Vine and DC Coleman were the investigating officers and three days after the knife attack Barry Vine arrested a sixteen-year-old called Tyler Pyke. Kathy Cooper and Brian Dusan, the dead boy’s parents, had appeared on television with the customary emotional appeal for any witnesses, Kathy claiming that her son had been in a gang against his will. He had been forced into it, she said, by ‘evil’ contemporaries he had been at school with who told him he had to join to defend them all against the ‘Pyke—Samuels gang’.

  ‘Nicky Dusan,’ Hannah told Wexford, ‘is the first cousin of that boy Rashid Hanif who is Tamima Rahman’s boyfriend and also cousin of Neil Dusan. He’s Brian Dusan’s sister’s son.’

  Wexford considered the name. ‘You mean Brian Dusan and his sister are Muslims?’

  Hannah was always happy to show off her extensive knowledge of Islam and its history. ‘They’re Bosnians. Bosnians have been Muslim for centuries. It’s a legacy the Turks left behind when they went. Brian Dusan is presumably lapsed, though it’s hard for Muslims to lapse.’ Wexford could see that Hannah was having problems here. A declared atheist herself and one who would have no hesitation in condemning any manifestation of Christianity out of hand, she steadily avoided criticism of Islam. ‘The sister is a devout Muslim,’ she said hastily. ‘She married Akbar Hanif and Rashid is one of their seven children.’

  How she would have condemned so large a family if the parents had been Roman Catholics! He smiled at her. ‘You’ve really been into this, haven’t you?’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult, guv. I knew it long before this stabbing happened. It’s been part of my research into the antecedents of people connected with the Rahmans.’

  ‘So you know as much about, say, Mr and Mrs Rahman’s relatives as you do about their daughter’s boyfriend’s.’

  ‘More. Much more. It’s a very large extended family. Mohammed Rahman has at least two sisters living in London. Yasmin Rahman has a sister in Stowerton who didn’t object at all to telling me her family’s history. Among the things she told me was that they’ve got another sister living in Pakistan whose marriage was arranged, though it sounded more like forced to me. This woman has a son who may be lined up to marry Tamima.’

  ‘May be? Not “is”?’

  Hannah was a good police officer. She wasn’t prepared to exaggerate to serve her own ends. ‘Only “may be,” guv. The sister thought this man a likely candidate but that’s all. It was really guesswork.’

  ‘Let’s concentrate,’ said Wexford, ‘on Kingsmarkham’s incipient gang warfare for now, shall we?’

  He no more believed in the Rahman forced marriage theory than Burden believed in his insistence on Targo as a murderer. Hannah took a few steps towards the door and turned round. She was fond of having the last word.

  ‘Tamima and her mother go to Pakistan on Thursday. I bought a loaf from her in the Raj Emporium yesterday and she told me.’

  When he drove himself home the route Wexford took was along Glebe Road into Glebe Lane, into Orchard Road and then the Avenue. He stopped when he saw a white van he thought might be Targo’s parked outside Webb and Cobb. He parked his own in front of the nail bar and looked up the white van’s number in the notebook he still carried. It was Targo’s but there was no sign of the van’s owner. Hannah had told him one of the Rahman sons was a computer consultant and when he had seen Targo go in there back in August he had been carrying what was very likely a computer. Wexford’s own skills in this particular technology were very limited but still he had an idea that a consultant or engineer or whatever the man was could make adjustments to what he called a machine by what he called remote control. Why then would Targo take the thing there? Or was he visiting for some other purpose?

  Wexford disliked the thought of showing himself. From where he sat in his own car he could see that the driver’s window in the van was open about four inches. No doubt the Tibetan spaniel was inside, no doubt waiting for an intruder to poke his face through that gap so that it could utter its single sharp yap. I shan’t give it the satisfaction, thought Wexford, laughing at his aunt’s phrase and driving off.

  On the day Tamima Rahman and her mother left for Islamabad, Hannah went to call on Fata Hanif. With her husband and seven children she lived in a house in Rectangle Road, Stowerton, that had once been two houses but had been converted into one by the local authority. In spite of its size, and the car parked on concrete slabs in what had once been a front garden, the Hanifs were obviously doing far less well than the Rahmans. Akbar Hanif had no job, had been out of work for years, and he and his family lived on benefits.

  He was not at home and nor were five of the children, for school had just returned after the summer holidays. Fata Hanif took her time answering the doorbell, possibly due to her pausing to tie a scarf round her head in case her caller were a man. There are many ways a woman can cover her hair but perhaps the most unflattering is when the scarf is brought low down over the forehead and high up to skim the chin. A pale face that had once been pretty peered out at Hannah from inside the
black cotton oval. The voice was unexpected, south-east London which would be called cockney north of the river.

  ‘What do you want?’

  It was said diffidently rather than rudely. It sounded feebly frightened.

  ‘May I come in?’ Hannah produced her warrant card, wondering if it would mean anything to this woman. ‘I’m a police officer but there’s nothing for you to worry about. There’s nothing wrong.’

  The door opened a few inches wider. Fortunately, Hannah was very slim. She squeezed through the opening. ‘This is just a friendly visit. I hope to have a talk with you about Tamima Rahman.’

  Immediately Mrs Hanif said, ‘I don’t know her.’

  They went into a living room. A baby lay asleep on the centre cushion of a three-seater sofa. An older child, perhaps two, was strapped into a high chair with, in front of it, a plateful of some sort of cereal he was slowly and almost ritualistically transferring to the floor, scooping it up in his fingers and smiling as it flopped on to a rug. Mrs Hanif took no notice of either child. It was the sort of room Hannah wouldn’t want to stay in for more than ten minutes at the most. Though clean, it showed the signs on every article of furniture of the depredations of children. Everything was broken or battered or scuffed or chipped or cracked or torn or split or crushed or frayed. With all those children the Hanifs must be receiving considerable amounts of benefit, but whatever they did with it, they didn’t spend it on improving their home.

  Hannah sat down next to the baby. Every other seat in the place was damaged in some way. A leg missing and the chair propped up on bricks, the seat itself split or the cover ripped off to expose splintered wood and sharp nails beneath. Mrs Hanif sat in the chair on the bricks and, though it wobbled, it held her weight.

  ‘I’d heard,’ Hannah said carefully, ‘that your son Rashid was friendly with her.’

  ‘He’s only a boy,’ Fata Hanif said. ‘He doesn’t go out with girls. His dad and me, we wouldn’t have it.’